Public notices should be public

Elected officials are elected to conduct the public's business. The public in turn looks to keep up with that business via reporting in media and by the posting of public notices.

Apparently in the eyes of some North Carolina legislators, including representatives from the mountains, this just won't do. They'd like to move the time-honored practice of posting public notices in local newspapers and instead post them in a less public spot, on governmental websites.

It's hard to imagine a less public spot. In fact, it's very hard to imagine a place where a public notice could more easily be hidden from the public.

Guess the far side of the moon was taken.

A number of bills, purportedly designed to save money, have been circulating in the General Assembly that will have the effect of pulling a veil over the public's eyes.

Do we have a dog in this hunt? Yes we do, as do all local newspapers of record, particularly small community newspapers. The financial impact of losing public legal notices on remote rural papers would be considerable.

But while having a moment of disclosure, we would add that we are not so na´ve that we don't see this as an attack on the press by some politicians who feel we should operate as their personal public relations departments.

A few weeks back newspaper representatives were at a Senate committee hearing on the legal notice issue. Newspaper representatives thought they had enough votes in the 11-member committee to defeat the proposed legislation.

A voice vote was taken, said to be too close to call; the hearing was adjourned before a call of hands or roll call vote could be taken.

Hal Tanner III, a conservative newspaper publisher and N.C. Press Association president, protested about the lack of a vote count; Tanner and other witnesses say committee chair Tommy Tucker told Tanner, "I am the senator; you are the citizen. You have to be quiet."

Be quiet.

That's undoubtedly many a politician's dream. If newspapers simply went away, life would be much easier for them.

That ain't gonna happen.

The real fight here is for the public's right to know.

Just last week, a front-page story appeared in the Citizen-Times regarding Buncombe County's efforts to secure expansion of a manufacturing plant identified in official records only as "Project X." The story involved a lot of money, including $2.7 million in incentives to the unnamed firm and $15.7 million spent on land and buildings.

Those figures came from legal advertisements paid for by the county.

Should those advertisements get buried in governmental websites, you the reader, you the citizen, may not have heard about Project X. The public notice may never have been made public.

Yet, numerous pieces of legislation would call for just that. Some of the bills are highly targeted; one, House Bill 504, whose sponsors include Rep. Chuck McGrady, R-Henderson, and co-sponsors include Buncombe Reps. Republican Reps. Tim Moffitt and Nathan Ramsey, applies to "the counties of Buncombe, Forsyth, Gaston, Mitchell, Henderson, Perquimans, Stanly, Surry, and Watauga and any municipality located wholly within those counties, and to the city of Raleigh and the town of Zebulon."

Really. Why just these counties? Is there some politics being played here?

Another, House Bill 755, would apply statewide, allowing the N.C. Department of Environmental and Natural Resources to run notices only on its own website.

Remember, the point of a public notice is to get the public to notice. A legal notice in print might not be seen by someone it would impact. But the odds of it being seen by someone who knows someone who might be impacted, thus rousing the public to awareness of an issue, are quite high.

As highly as we might think of the investigative skills of our reporters, the truth in the news business is that many stories are simply stumbled upon, either by us or by our readers. The odds of stumbling across a story where few walk - when was the last time you perused the depths of a governmental website - seem to us rather small.

There are other bills out there worth a look such as House Bill 723, which caps the amount newspapers can charge for public notices and includes a requirement to run them online as well as in print.

Moving ads online to governmental websites is bad public policy. It leaves out those without Internet access or a computer. It carries with it an assumption people are somehow going to know where to go and what to look for regarding matters that could affect them.

If you wake up one morning to find the lot next to your house has been rezoned to commercial and it's too late to do anything about the concrete plant going in next door, being told that you should've gone to www.whatever to be alerted isn't going to be a very satisfying explanation, is it?

If governments want to carry these notices on their websites, well, they can knock themselves out. We're certainly not going to stop them.

But public notices belong where the public will notice them.

It's that simple.

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Public notices should be public

Elected officials are elected to conduct the public's business. The public in turn looks to keep up with that business via reporting in media and by the posting of public notices.